Europe’s own satnav Galileo goes live

Brussels: After 17 years, numerous setbacks and three times over budget, Europe’s Galileo satnav system went live on Thursday, promising to outperform rivals and guarantee regional self-reliance.
Initial services, free to users worldwide, are available only on smartphones and navigation units fitted with Galileo-compatible microchips.
Some devices may need only a software update to start using the service, according to the European Commission, which funds the 10 billion euro ($11 billion) project.
“After years of intense work, we are ready to declare the initial services of Galileo,” EU Industry Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska announced in Brussels. “We are joining the closed club of providers of navigation services.”
With 18 satellites in place so far, Galileo’s signal will be intermittent at first, requiring a boost from satellites in the American GPS system.
But it will grow more reliable and independent over time as orbiters are added to the network circling 23,222 km above Earth.
Its proud parents, the commission and European Space Agency, said Galileo should be fully operational by 2020, providing time and positioning data of unprecedented accuracy.
People have become increasingly reliant on geo-localisation for anything from finding bars, pharmacies or the shortest holiday route to tracing parked cars or lost Alzheimer’s patients.
Ultimately, Galileo’s free Open Service will be able to pinpoint a location to within a metre, compared to several metres for GPS and Russia’s GLONASS.
A paying service will provide even more precise data, to within centimetres. Such precision would be invaluable for safer driverless cars and nuclear power plants, for example.
“When fully operational, Galileo’s Search and Rescue service will reduce the time it takes to detect a person lost at sea or in the mountains from three hours to just 10 minutes after a distress beacon is activated,” the Galileo website says.
Its signal will eventually reach areas where none is possible today — inside traffic tunnels and on streets where high buildings shield radio waves from satellites flying low on the horizon.
For now, free use is only for owners of two Galileo-compatible cellphones (BQ’s Aquaris X5 Plus and Huawei’s Mate 9), and about a dozen types of Galileo-ready chips produced by Qualcomm, Broadcom, Intel, Mediatek and u-blox.
A list of Galileo-enabled products can be consulted at www.useGalileo.eu. “We need the businesses to invest in and innovate with Galileo. To create new applications, new services,” said Bienkowska.
The civilian-controlled service is of great strategic importance for Europe, which relies on two military-run services — GPS and GLONASS, which provide no guarantee of uninterrupted service. — AFP